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January 13, 2012

Farewell To BlogPulse

Today, according to the announcement on the BlogPulse homepage, is the day that Neilsen will shutter the longstanding blog analysis and search site.

BlogPulse was originally envisioned by Natalie Glance, myself and other colleagues at Intelliseek as a way to track popular blog posts, people and phrases in the blogosphere. It launched with a sparse set of features in 2003 with the following design:

including key phrases which, at that time looked like this:

The site evolved to become a full blog search engine (I was actually against this at the time preferring to focus on analytics) and launched what was my favourite feature in 2004 : trend search. By that time the site was looking far more mature:

In that year, BlogPulse was named a 'trendsetting product' by KMWorld.

On top of the evolving set of capabilities, we started to publish longer analytical articles including this analysis of the Swift Boat story:

And these views of the 2005 Tsunami:

While (I assume) these assets will no longer be available from their adoptive source, the are archived at the wonderful Web Archive, so if you are feeling nostalgic for a simpler, slightly less caffeinated social media world, head on over and take a look.

One final note: I've always felt that social media analysis, just as it gets comfortable with a particular form of content, gets distracted by a new, shiny channel, abandons the legacy data and starts furiously reinventing its wheels. This certainly happened with the blogosphere when Twitter and Facebook showed up and consumers started to believe that 'real time' was something the blogosphere couldn't provide. From where I'm standing, blogs are alive!

If you have any fond memories of BlogPulse, please drop them in the comments to this blog. If you have generated some interesting trend graphs, send me a link and I'll summarize them in an update to this post.

For the record, the number of discovered blogs reported by BlogPulse right now is 182,397,015.

Comments

Blogs are still considered to be evolving (or not?). At least this is my intention based on the literature and on the increasing number of blogs, blog posts etc. Though Facebook and twitter are growing, I agree that blogs are alive. Is there any specific reason why blogpulse shut down?

I will miss blogpulse. I saw found this after I discovered that it was redirecting to incite a few days ago. The web does reinvent the wheel quite a bit, especially in the last 10 years.

I submitted new blogs to blogpulse for several years, and still subscribed to the key people feed. I noticed, though, the service has a whole had went unloved (abandoned?) for a long time. At least it's not suffering anymore. :)